Monday, August 7, 2017

What can we say come September 3? 13th after Pentecost

For us, Labor Day
weekend attendance sags – and I hate it for the people, as we are treated this
week to not one but two of the most fantastic texts in all of Scripture: Exodus
3:1-15, and Matthew 16:21-28.I am
startled by the way these 2 texts coincide and perhaps mark the revelatory
turning point in both testaments respectively – sheer luck, evidently, as the
lectionary is plodding through Exodus and Matthew.Maybe God is good after all…

In The
Beauty of the Word and everything else I’ve written on preaching, I try
to remind myself and others that sermons are to be about God, and then about us
only secondarily.These two texts make
this clear.We see with striking
brilliance who God is; so preachers, focus first on God and don’t rush quickly
to moralisms or takeaways, which in these cases can be as silly and
trite as “If you see a bush on fire, take off your shoes.”

Exodus 3 reveals to us a God who hears,
who cares, who calls, who comes down to save – and not merely pie in the sky
afterlife saving, but real, physical, socio-economic saving.The Israelites’ need for saving is so fitting
for Labor Day.Our taskmasters are
gentler than Egypt’s, but no less impersonal and depersonalizing.Walter Brueggemann, in his jewel of a book, Sabbath
as Resistance, shows how labor/economic systems look like pyramids,
with the insecure potentate at the top, and all other subservient to his whims,
existing only to produce for him.

God asks Moses to go down (could your
choir or somebody sing “Go
Down, Moses”? – which, incidentally, originated during slavery; Harriet
Tubman was nicknamed Moses for her
leadership in the Underground Railroad, which went way down to let people
go).The pattern of Moses’ call is
typical of Scripture – and of our lives.God appears, usually uninvited, surprisingly invading someone’s
space.God asks for something huge.The mere mortal responds with reasons why
it’s not going to happen: Moses can’t speak, Jeremiah was too young, Mary
hadn’t been with a man, Isaiah was unholy, Jonah loathed the would-be
recipients of God’s mercy.But God
counters with a sign, with divine reassurance.

Gerhard von Rad pointed out that “Neither previous faith nor any other
personal endowment had the slightest part to play in preparing a man who was
called to stand before Yahweh for his vocation.”

A helpful preaching tactic can be to say
God isn’t looking for ability, but
for avail-ability.Oddly, this is a key preaching point, as we
do spiritual gifts inventories and strength finders – yet in Scripture God just
picks people, usually and apparently precisely because they don’t have the
gifts or native abilities!The preacher
may well want to explore these matters – but in a way that continues to hammer
home the truth that it’s about God, not us.As long as I’m the center of things, even the sermon, I’ll never
discover that mere availability can be the entrée to the miraculous.

This text is about God, and God is what
our lives are to be about.Here we see
that God will save – for what purpose?“So
that you will worship me on this mountain.”We exist to praise, notice, admire, be in awe of and simple be astounded
by God.An expansive mind, blown wide
open by such a God, isn’t baffled by questions like Moses’ – how a bush could
burn but not really.

There are
naturalistic explanations: the Jewish scholar Nahum Sarna explained that the
bush in question was the prickly rubus
sanctus, which grows beside wadis, with lowers resembling small roses.Was it a common bush that moved Moses
somehow?Doesn’t the story suggest
something far weirder?I’ve quoted it,
but would ask preachers not to resort to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Aurora
Lee” (unless you’re making my point here…), which closes with this:

Earth’s crammed with heaven

And every common bush afire with God;

But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,

The rest sit round it and pluck
blackberries…

God could
use any common bush, or God could dazzle briefly; the point isn’t the bush, but
that God got Moses’ attention when he is far from Egypt, deliberately avoiding
the place where his destiny would play out.The early rabbis, interestingly, saw in the bush an allegory of Israel’s
life, sorely oppressed but not consumed.Allegory is despised by modern scholarship – but as Augustine, Aquinas
and Luther were great allegorizers, I’m sure God wouldn’t mind if a preacher
saw the church in this bush – under fire yet not destroyed.

That this text is about God is reiterated
when Moses asks, with naïve innocence I think, What is your name?God’s
answer is – evasive? teasing Moses and us into a deep mystery? Or is the name
and hence the divine nature just too overwhelming for a mere Hebrew word?Jews rightly omit the pronunciation of the
name, which must be something like Yahweh (which seminarians utter with total
abandon, gleeful in their thin knowledge of Hebrew, discounting the historic
Jewish reverence for the name!).

What
can it mean, even if shrouded in mystery, this “he who must not be named” (and
yes, as a Harry Potter fan I’ll
probably play off Voldemort…)?

Yahweh looks like a verb.I like this a lot.God isn’t a static thing, but an action, a
movement, a happening.The vowels
intimate that this verbal form is causative:God is the one who causes things to happen.So God happens; and God makes things
happen.Thirdly, this verb’s y prefix
implies a future, an as-yet-incomplete action.God is the one who above all else will be.What was Jesus’ parting promise?“I will be with you always.”Whatever future we envision, God will be
there; it will be about God, and for God.2 Corinthians 5:7 says we “walk by faith, not by sight”; Hebrews 11:1
describes faith as “the conviction of things not seen.”What is unseen?Not invisible things, but future things.

This business of naming God correctly
fascinates me.We pray “in Jesus’ name,”
but what is his name?Jesus, yeshua, means “Lord, help!”Did Mary cry these words during her labor
pains?Isn’t Jesus the one who cries out
for help with and for us, and simultaneously the one who is our help?Of course, this “I am” tease by God in
response to Moses’ query drives the Christian forward toward Jesus’ way of
speaking in John’s Gospel – which clearly is playing on this passage.

Everything in our nature and in society
drives us into the self, to ask Who am I?The riddle is only answered by learning the answer to Who is God?Shortly before his death, Dietrich Bonhoeffer
famously wrote, “Who am I? This or the other?” – taking note of his cheerful
disposition he presented to his jailers, while knowing inside he was impotent
and weak.The only way he could resolve
the dissonance, and the struggle to be in horrific circumstances, came like
this: “Whoever I am, thou knowest, O God, I am thine.”

Brevard Childs, in his definitive
commentary on Exodus, summarized what Exodus 3 is about: “Revelation is not
information about God and his nature, but an invitation to trust in the one
whose self-disclosure is a foretaste of the promised inheritance.The future for the community of faith is not
an unknown leap into the dark, because the Coming One accompanies the faithful
toward that end.”

The God who hears, cares, and then comes
down takes on flesh in Jesus – and this dramatic hearing, caring and going down
is nowhere more puzzling or wonderful than in Matthew 16:21-28.

Years ago I stumbled upon an audio recording
of Henri Nouwen’s A
Spirituality of Waiting (which I can’t commend highly enough… just
hearing his voice…)In it, he expanded
upon the work of W.H. Vanstone’s profound book called The
Stature of Waiting, in which he directs our attention to the peculiar
plot of the Gospels.In the opening chapters
of each Gospel, Jesus is in control, he is an actor on the stage of history,
dashing off miracles, wowing the multitudes.Then, in the middle of the story, everything changes.At Caesarea Philippi, Jesus has ventured far
to the north, then turns his face toward Jerusalem, explaining he will be “handed
over” and suffer and die.From this
point forward, Jesus is pretty much passive, with only a minor miracle left to
do, one now acted upon, no dazzling (except by the powerful vision of
compassionate, suffering love).

This stuns Vanstone and Lewis (and me too)
– as we think life’s plot should be toward increasing control, independence –
and we loathe any turn toward dependence.I had a close friend with colon cancer.A few years back, on the week I was preparing to preach on this text, he
told me with immense sorrow, “Today they handed me over to hospice.”We shudder; we pity – but Jesus invites us to
respect and relish this backwards plot to our lives, for it was the plot of his
life.Jesus was amazing in his first
weeks of ministry.But the real glory
came when he let himself be betrayed, beaten, tried unjustly, when he “never
said a-mumblin’ word,” when he refused to come down from the cross or strike
his enemies dead but instead forgave them.Even his resurrection was passive:he didn’t bolt from the tomb and knock the guards aside; God raised him.

Everything in us, especially as can-do
Americans who cherish our independence above all else, rebels against and
shrinks back from this.But this is
God.Peter, like us, chides Jesus for
even thinking of such a path.But Jesus
says “Get behind me” – which, ironically, is precisely where we need to
be.We follow Jesus – and you can only follow
from behind.

Exodus 3 and Matthew 16 both benefit from
listening to Philippians 2 as background music.Paul explains God’s ultimate nature:“Though he was in the form of God, he emptied himself” – and I concur
with those who translate this not as although he was God he did this
humbling thing, but rather because he was in the form of God,
he emptied himself.Jesus isn’t
play-acting or pretending for a short time to be humble, vulnerable, and
suffering.Jesus shows us the very heart
of God, God’s truest, most core nature when he turns his face to Jerusalem and
gets mocked and gruesomely killed.

You see, Jesus uttered these words about turning his face to Jerusalem to be passive, vulnerable, and to die, not in a church or with a beautiful sunset in the background. He was in Caesarea Philippi, a place sacred to pagan deities for centuries, then more recently dedicated to the emperor, who was increasingly viewed and treated as a deity strutting the earth. This artist's depiction of the city in Jesus' day shows temples to the Greek gods, to the emperor, affixed to the cave dedicated to the nature god Pan - which was also believed to be the entrance to the underworld ("and the gates of hell shall not prevail..."). Painting the physical place might help in a sermon; and the theology of the clash between the world's gods and the humility of the true God must be clarified. {the images are Rouault's "Mocking of Christ," and an artist's rendition of Caesarea Philippi during the time of Jesus}************************************

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About Me

I’m pastor of Myers Park United Methodist Church in Charlotte, NC, and I also teach preaching and ministry at Duke Divinity School as an adjunct. I write regular inspirational/ educational pieces you’ll find here, reviews of books pertinent to faith today and ministry, and I love to be part of conversations about life with God and in the world among Christians and clergy.